A cover article of this week’s New York Times Magazine explores developments over the past century in the field of linguistics (“Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”). Author Guy Deutscher writes:
Some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.
This raises interesting questions about religion. If a Matses man can’t say he HAS a wife unless she is in sight, what does this mean for believing in God or Jesus Christ? The Matses man, presumably, can never say he HAS a relationship with God because God is never seen. And so, can a Matses be a Christian? Does a Matses even have the capacity to believe in God?
Unfortunately, the Times article doesn’t delve further into these questions. Most of the article is about what linguistics does not do, and about the Guugu Yimithirr tribe that determines all direction geographically (as in north-south-east-west) instead of spatially (as in right-left-forward-back).
An excellent article on this subject was John Colapinto’s “The Interpreter,” published in 2007 in The New Yorker. It profiles American linguistics professor Dan Everett’s mission to learn the bird-like language of the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe. What he is finding could become an earthquake for Christianity.
To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.
… [His ex-wife] Keren’s perspective on Pirahã derives from her missionary impulses, he said. “It would be impossible for her to believe that we know the language, because that would mean that the Word of God doesn’t work.”
